DEP officials are telling a different story as the battle over a lawsuit Bartos filed against the agency unfolded Thursday before a jury in U.S. Middle District Court in Harrisburg.

They claim Bartos, a former solid waste manager, was canned for making racist comments and for intimidating subordinates to the point that some were afraid to come to work.

Bartos’ firing in late 2007 wasn’t tied to his claim that DEP recycling money was wrongly routed to a West Shore-based non-profit that specialized in combating roadside litter, DEP officials contend.

They insist there was no waste or fraud and certainly no crime.

Bartos, the city clerk for Shamokin, is suing DEP, its former secretary Kathleen A. McGinty, and Bartos’ ex-boss, Kenneth Reisinger, director of the Bureau of Waste Management.

In opening arguments Bartos’ lawyer, Frank P. Clark, said Bartos, 50, of Mount Carmel, Northumberland County, became a “victim of retaliation” after revealing “uncomfortable information.”

Clark said Bartos, a veteran of the U.S. Department of Energy, found that information when asked to be McGinty’s proxy on the board of Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful, an East Pennsboro Twp.-based nonprofit.

What Bartos found, Clark said, was that recycling grant money awarded to Schuylkill and Lehigh counties and Allentown was being passed by those entities to KPB.

The pass-throughs were occurring even though KPB did work that wouldn’t qualify for the recycling cash, Clark said.

He said Bartos voiced concern to Reisinger and asked for an independent audit, but Reisinger told him to do his own review.

When Bartos filed a 360-page report, Reisinger only sent selective bits of it up the chain of command, Clark said. Even so, he said the grant money diversions to KPB were quietly halted.

Clark said the retaliation began later that year when Bartos was up for promotion to head DEP’s recycling unit.

The recycling chief at the time, Larry Holley, told Reisinger that Bartos had made racist remarks about Holley, who is black.

The charges were false, Clark said, but Reisinger suspended Bartos, who appealed the accusations and was fired after other employees accused him of threatening them.

Clark said Bartos’ suit ultimately is based on a simple concept.

“This case,” he said, “is about government employees trying to adjust the truth.”

DEP lawyer Joseph Goldberg said the truth is that Bartos was fired for being a bully.

His ouster came months after the KPB report, which had nothing to do with the firing, Goldberg said.

He insisted that Bartos’ findings regarding the KPB money weren’t hidden, and that McGinty even asked the state Inspector General’s Office investigate. That office found no wrongdoing, he said.

“No one was arrested. No one was fined,” Goldberg said. “No one was charged with any crime. Nothing.”

Halting the flow of recycling money to KPB was a “policy decision,” he said.

Bartos’ alleged racist remarks and threats gave Reisinger no choice but to fire him, said Goldberg, who claimed the termination was backed by a human resources investigation.

Bartos testified that he was transferred to DEP’s central office in Harrisburg in 2006 to pursue a statewide expansion of COALS — Clean Our Anthracite Lands and Streams — an illegal dump clean-up program he’d begun in Williamsport.

KPB’s recycling grant funding raised his suspicions soon after he was named McGinty’s proxy to that group, he said under questioning by Clark.

Bartos said he asked Reisinger for an independent audit because even his preliminary probe raised the hackles of his DEP co-workers.

“It was causing a lot of divisiveness,” he said. “I was concerned that I wasn’t getting full disclosure.”

Bartos is to continue testifying when the trial resumes today before Chief Judge Yvette Kane.

According to news reports, Bartos also was fired as Northumberland County’s planning director in 2009 for insubordination.

He is a former renewable/green energy coordinator for the state House Democratic Caucus and in 2010 made an unsuccessful bid for the 107th state House District.

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